Help us help our community, pleads Genesis Trust
Over the past weeks some 318 people were provided with food parcels by the SafePlace team.
Since the outbreak of Covid-19 and the subsequent lockdown, the issue of the provision of food parcels to families in need has become of critical importance.
The Genesis Trust is the community outreach vehicle of the Norwegian Settlers’ Church in Marburg. One of its ministries is the SafePlace Project.
Five containers have been placed in various strategic spots where there is a serious incidence of domestic and sexual violence.
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These containers are staffed by security personnel and a social worker and are open every evening and over weekends.
Being located at informal settlements and townships around Port Shepstone enables the Genesis SafePlaces to operate throughout the communities of Merlewood, Bhoboyi and Murchison.
These residential areas house several thousand people, large numbers of whom are unemployed and indigent. Moreover, vast numbers of those who had been employed before the lockdown now find themselves unemployed and without an income.
Although the government has announced a number of measures to alleviate the situation such unemployment insurance funding, the resources available to it are very limited and the relief has as of yet either come very slowly or not at all.
Genesis Sustainability Coordinator, Joléne Bester-Vujevic says that being locked in means that the very desperate have no chance of earning an income to buy food. This creates a dangerous situation as it invites the plunder of stores and other people’s homes with consequent civil unrest. It can furthermore lead to starvation on a massive scale.
The Genesis Trust at present operates the Genesis Care Centre, a step-down hospice facility that accommodates 40 terminally ill patients and the El Roi Baby Home, a child and youth care facility, which accommodates 12 abandoned infants and toddlers.
These patients and children are cared for and fed daily by the Genesis Trust.
Over and above this, over the past weeks some 318 people were provided with food parcels by the SafePlace team.
These parcels were however only intended to feed a family until April 16. Now that the lockdown has been extended by the president until April 30, the challenge is even greater. Some 40 percent of those they need to reach are children under the age of 16.
The social workers in their employ identify needy families in the areas served by the SafePlaces so as to ensure that food parcels reach those most in need and with donations received from congregants and business people and other benefactors, they make up food parcels and distribute them to beneficiaries.
The Genesis Trust desperately requires financial support or donations of non-perishable food to enable it to continue doing so during this period of crisis. As it is, they have been able to reach only a handful of those in a dire situation.
Anyone who would like to make a donation in cash or in kind can contact Joléne at 063 7617630.
“If ever South Africans needed to stand together to save lives and our people, it is now,” she said.
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